While the conversion of analog to digital television was a great leap forward in the transmission and reception of audiovisual content for many reasons such as transmission bandwidth gain and improved picture quality, channel change speed had become significantly slower. This is because the digital receiver executes many tasks before it is ready to show a first image of the new channel. Processing time is notably spent in extraction and buffering of audio and/or video (AV) packets and filling of a receiver buffer with AV packets extracted from a digital transmission before any moving image can be shown and before audio can be rendered in a synchronized manner with the moving images (lip sync). In order to overcome this disadvantage that was felt by many users as a regression, various solutions were developed that are commonly referred to as Fast Channel Change (FCC). One of these solutions to the FCC problem is Internet Protocol (IP) unicast burst transmission of audio/video content before joining a multicast IP stream. A receiver changing channel requests a unicast burst with audio/video contents. As the burst is at a speed faster than playout rate, the receiver can quickly fill its reception buffer with audio/video packets of the new channel and quickly start decoding and rendering, and then switches to reception of audio/video packets from a multicast stream. Moving images are shown when enough audio and video data is received.
There is thus a need for further reduction of channel change delay.